Bonjour Tristesse was a melodrama that somehow felt incredibly real. Obsessed with the way the author depicted familial relationships.

A Certain Smile: I don't think this is a popular opinion but I liked this one better, probably because I was able to connect with the material *slightly* more. It's a very ordinary story about falling in love and getting your heart shattered for the first time but told extraordinarily and with a great deal of compassion. Love will absolutely devastate you and rewire your brain but the pain is temporary and Paris is forever. ( )

This book is actually two novellas - the title novella and A Certain Smile. In Bonjour Tristesse, the narrator is in her late teens and enjoying a fairly permissive life with her womanising widowed father when circumstances change one summer requiring some drastic action. I'm not sure I'd go as far as The Guardian's comment that 'Françoise Sagan is the French F. Scott Fitzgerald', but certainly she captures well the essence of that heady era of wealthy adults with questionable moral compasses enjoying the pleasures of hot summers in the south of France. It's extraordinary, given the quality and maturity of Sagan's writing, to think that this was her first book at the tender age of 18. She captures perfectly the lightness of youth, offering a sardonic, outside perspective of the types of gatherings depicted by the likes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

In A Certain Smile, the narrator is a late teen who, bored with her young boyfriend, embarks on an affair with his much older uncle. Every teen is wont to think they have life sussed, but this young protagonist finds out the hard way that she's not quite so in control of things as she'd like to think.

What's clever about Sagan's writing is that she wrote commandingly from the perspective of young women, yet at the same time shows so clearly the naivety of youth to the reader, which given the young age she was when she wrote these novellas is commendable.

I absolutely loved these two novellas - they were fun and absorbing and set in one of my favourite eras for fiction, and I'll certainly be looking out for other titles by Sagan which have been translated.

4.5 stars - the perfect holiday read. ( )

Meh. Sorry, but that's my reaction to BONJOUR TRISTESSE, this so-called modern "classic" of eroticism. Erotic? Not. Slow? Very. Boring? Yep. But I kept reading to the very end. And thank God it was barely a hundred pages long. It's narrated by Cecilie, a spoiled 17 year-old, two years out of a ten-year stint in convent school, who lives with her long-widowed middle-aged father Raymond, a shallow, skirt-chasing rake, who has taught her the joys of a mindless and carefree disolute life. Enter an old family friend, Anne, a forty-ish intelligent, sophisticated career woman, who goes after Raymond, determined to civilize both father and daughter. She is initially successful, driving off Elsa, the current, much younger mistress. And there is Cyril, 25, who becomes Cecile's lover as their long, lazy beachtown summer progresses - excruciatingly long, as nothing much really happens. Jealous, Cecilie devises a plan, using Cyril and Elsa, to get rid of Anne. Jealous? Yeah, because it appears Cecile has a giant, albeit repressed, crush on Daddy. At least that's my take on the whole situation. There are some tragic consequences, but no one feels bad for very long. "Hello Sadness"? Not really. More like, Let the Good Times Roll. My apologies to any literary pundits of the past sixty years who found Sagan's story so classic, shocking, erotic or whatever, because I found it to be an enormous bore.

And I thought I was getting such a bargain twofer in this Penguin Classics edition, which tacks on Sagan's next novella, A CERTAIN SMILE. Well, the first couple pages, with phrases like, "He bores me, I really don't care about any of this." or "I was quietly rather bored" quickly disabused me of any such notion. After scanning a few more pages of the second story, I quickly agreed with its narrator. I don't care about any of this either. Enough of Francoise Sagan's fashionable French ennui for this old fart. On to something a bit better, I hope. Not recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

This is on the 1001 books list, and I have completey failed to understand why. It's a short tale of a young girl who is used to her father having mistresses and, thereby, getting her own way as he spoils her. Only this summer, in the South of France, he announces he is going to marry Anne, a woman of his own age who waa a friend of his dead wife. Anne has some quite different views on life, and certainly on young Celine, that differ quite from the usual way things go. Celeine is not happy about this, and so devises a plot where the last mistress and her current boyfriend pretend to be an item in order to make her father jealous. She never quite thinks this through to the end and so what actually happens is not what she wanted to happen - if she ever really knew.
At times she seems very young, the way she doesn;t think this through, for example. At others she seems older, her behaviour and the plot itself seem to be unlikely in a 17 year old.
At one point she muses (and I'm paraphrasing) ...or am I a silly, spolt, selfish girl...? and my answer was a resounding "yes". Maybe that says more about me than the book, I'm more of an age with Anne, and Celine annoyed me in the way teenagers can.
It was a quick read, and not difficult, but not something I will return to any time soon. ( )

Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile both explore the emotional maturation of an indulgently carefree young woman on the cusp of adulthood.

There's a certain cerebral charm to the frivolity and immaturity the very flawed protagonists present. What impresses me even more is the author's ability to capture that feeling - that confident thoughtlessness - of youth, helped along by the deceptively simple prose (here translated by Irene Ash). And to have these accurately-captured precocious voices set against an intoxicatingly drowsy-summer beach atmosphere, the result of which is an excellent combination of escapism and bildungsroman.

Recommended for reading on a beach during the height of summer. ( )